I can see from the red puffiness of his eyes that he’s been crying. The jelly’s a horrible gloop. Slowly, taking care, he straps my wrists to the arms of the chair.
– And now the ankles, we do the same.
I’m trembling all over as he annoints them, and locks the metal clasps. I’m freezing and I feel sick.
Now, ladies, gentlemen and children, says Craig Devon. His voice reverberates around me. I must ask you for complete silence, please, until after the Final Adjustment. Will Dr Pappadakis please now blindfold the voyager.
There’s a show-biz drum-roll, and Dr Pappa reaches for John’s sequinned oeuvre. It glints in the sun.
– I do not want this job, murmurs the doctor. Do not blame me, Voyager.
I nod, and he slides the blindfold over my eyes.
Darkness.
We will now begin the countdown, says the meaty voice of Craig.
That’s when the panic kicks in. I’m shaking, shaking – the fear flops across me in shuddering freezing waves. What if – what if they don’t – I don’t want to die. I’m not ready, and I’ll never be ready. I’m human.
– Ten, nine, eight –
Oh God! It’s so slow! So slow! Please hurry up!
– Seven, six, five –
And now it’s too fast! It’s happening too fast! Everything rushing in on me, screaming at me, my mind a blur, a tidal wave of noise. I can picture Fishook’s finger poised above the console. His head leaning down.
– Four – I squeeze my eyes shut.
– Three – I groan.
– Two – I tighten up my arse.
– One –
– STOP!
A woman’s voice. Small and firm as a bullet.
The crowd goes ape. After a split second of shocked silence, they’re yelling and screaming, tugging this way and that in a drunken Mexican wave. They came to see a man finally adjust! What’s going on?
What’s going on is this: Kidd’s ex-wife has whipped off her black veil and snatched the Captain’s hand away from the button. The blond man has grabbed him from behind and handcuffed him, fast as a magician’s trick. A sudden whirl of movement, and the woman’s drawn a gun from her handbag and she’s pointing it right at Fishook’s head! Another flurry and the Greek doctor has ripped Kidd’s blindfold off, and he’s swaying numbly in the light.
– Am I still alive? I mumble. The air seems to whirr around me. It’s the crowd, screaming.
– Yes, says a woman’s voice. And so am I.
It can’t be. I look up, and nearly faint. It is.
– Hannah! Alive. Dizzy, I close my eyes again. Then open them. She’s still there. Smiling at me like in a thousand dreams. The joy of it floods me in a rush, like I’m suddenly drunk, or drugged, or both, and I feel my smile stretch and stretch until my face aches with it. A thousand dreams.
Just kill me now.
Wesley Pike doesn’t recognise Benedict at first. Focusing, dazzled, he thinks simply, he looks familiar, he looks –
Then the feverishness kicks in again. Benedict. Pike groans, reaches for a chair, and sinks into it. The puzzle hasn’t fitted into place yet. Next to him, the Liberty Machine’s cool body hums. He shifts his glance back to the screen, still not taking it in.
Can that actually be Hannah Park, handing the gun to Dr Pappadakis – he seems to have offered to take over – and unstrapping Harvey Kidd, and – embracing him?
Pike licks dry lips. Tries to breathe steadily and evenly. Can’t.
Benedict is looking straight at him, or so it seems. He must know exactly where the cameras are. His face is like a coin flashing in the light. Pike recoils from the terrible, treacherous intimacy of his glance.
Fuck you, it says. I’m Benedict, and I know best.
Pike feels his own face go white. Hadn’t he known this about Benedict, right from the start? Hadn’t he said as much, in the People Laboratory? Made the boy blush?
The crowd is losing control, rage and frustration sweeping through it like a crackling bushfire.
– Wait! says a voice that reverberates across the harbour.
With the sudden swiftness of a snake spitting venom, the blond man has puckered his lips, shot a bright ball of green chewing gum from his mouth, taken the microphone, and put a hand in the air for silence.
– You came to see a Final Adjustment, he says. The crowd stops. Hushes. – So here’s an offer.
The amplifier picks up his voice, and scatters it. They’re listening now. The hush thickens and fills.
– Give us a few minutes of your time. If you’re not convinced by what we say, the Final Adjustment will go ahead. But if you are – Harvey Kidd will go free.
A murmur washes across the crush of people as he gestures the prisoner forward.
– Mr Kidd, he says to the grey-faced figure, who is grinning like a maniac. You have one minute in which to tell the customers of Atlantica the truth about the Hoggs.
The Final Adjustment will go ahead… My heart spasms and tumbles.
I should be prepared for this, but my instructions in the rhino shit were brief and anonymous and it was all a bit last-minute and – well… The truth about the Hoggs is suddenly feeling like a pretty tall order.
The big scary emptiness down below jolts me back. They’re waiting.
I clear my throat, an ugly barking noise that vibrates around me.
– The fact is, I stammer, the Hoggs aren’t what you think.
But it’s a bad start.
The microphone throws my voice into the air and echoes back, sounding fake and wheedling, as though I’m begging for my life. Which I suppose I am. The ugly yells are starting again. The customer doesn’t like it. He wants something more, or something else, you can hear it from the way his voice foams and froths upwards, curdling in the zinging wind. He came to see a man die. He wants his money back. I’m just a bloke, I think. How’m I supposed to – Five million pairs of eyes on me. Five million pairs of ears waiting.
– I always wanted a family, I babble. I didn’t have one, I was an orphan.
I’m shaking now.
– And so –
I shut my eyes.
I can’t do it. The Hoggs are still my family. If I tell the truth about how they came to me, I’ll lose them again, and for ever. And then what will I do? And who will I be?
I’m lost! Just kill me now!
When I open my eyes, there’s Hannah. She’s guessed my thoughts, because there’s a pleading fierceness on her face, and in that split second I know I have to do it for her, for me, for the customer, for all of us. From nowhere, the energy’s exploding inside me like a potent capsule, and I’m speaking in a new strong voice I barely know.
– I made them up.
From down on the dock side the crowd’s foaming voice deepens with a raucous menace, but there’s no stopping me now.
– They don’t exist! They’re inventions! I generated them on a computer, and that’s all they are. They’re not real, they’re not real, they’re NOT REAL!
I’m smiling. Smiling because it’s out, escaping like gas from a balloon whooshing high and invisibly majestic into the bright air. Something lifts within me: a huge weight’s gone; a heaviness that I didn’t know I carried. As my words float out across the harbour, I can almost see Mum and Dad, Uncle Sid and Cameron and Lola flying with them, in V formation, like a flock of birds migrating to a warmer place, carried on the peppermint breeze, up and away, joining the dancing molecules, leaving me behind. It gives me the strength to say it louder. In fact I’m shouting now, swept by a tingling, unfathomable euphoria. The blond man’s nodding at me eagerly. I see the relief break on Hannah’s face and she smiles the most dazzling and beautiful smile I’ve ever seen, and so I yell it again and again and again, I yell out the whole story, the whole nub of it, because I’ve found my true voice now, the voice that comes from deep inside me, from where my inner self hides.